Moses

by Howard Fast

  So Nun did what he had to do in the simplest and most direct terms. Unobtrusively, he watched the coming and going of the Captain of Chariots, and then late one night he waited for him. As the Egyptian passed, Nun stepped quietly behind him, hooked an arm about his neck and, with his other hand on his wrist, closed a vice that snapped Hetep-Re’s neck like a reed. Then Nun let him fall to the ground, where he was found the following morning.

  Nun’s dread then was that Moses would know and vent his anger—or more—upon him; but Moses gave no evidence of such knowledge to Nun. And to an extent-lacking only the proof that makes knowledge absolute—Moses did know, and knew surely that no other man in the army had the terrible strength required to kill a man in such a fashion, before the victim could either struggle or resist. It was not an easy thought for Moses; the fact that he had killed in battle with his own hands did not, strangely, lessen his horror of murder; yet that horror was balanced by the awareness of Nun’s devotion—a devotion both wonderful and frightening.

  Nor was Moses alone in his suspicions and conclusions. The mantle and symbol of his godliness protected Nun; but now the two of them could not live on in the city as they had before. Thus it was that Sokar-Moses had a long and serious talk with the Prince of Egypt, getting down to the fact that when a flame of this kind of trouble started, it was hard to find enough water with which to put it out. Looking at Moses thoughtfully, his heavy face troubled with need for a solution that was beyond his wit and understanding, he tried at one and the same time to talk to a prince and god-and to a man in his command. It made an uneasy combination, for while it was quite true that Ramses was not eager to have Moses back in the Delta—which Sokar-Moses knew—it was also true that the death of Moses in any circumstance which the Captain of Hosts could have prevented might well require, as a symbolic measure of justice, the death of Sokar-Moses himself. So while, as he pointed out, he could not blame Moses for killing Hetep-Re, who was not much good for anything anyway, the dead man did have friends.

  Moses replied that it was not his custom to go around killing people and that he had not killed Hetep-Re. How he despised these petty plots and counterplots! Here they were, a great army of conquerors, camped in the ruins of a city of mud-brick houses and stricken, hate-filled people, with no other occupation than to pick it clean of every thing of value it contained and cultivate boredom and discontent. He sensed well how each day there would be more plots hatched, more hostility and greed and corruption—until in time it would take all Sokar-Moses’ brutal discipline to keep the soldiers from destroying each other. Day by day, parties went out to raid whatever little villages they could find, but mostly the villages were empty; the people had fled, taking with them all they could carry—and leaving precious little booty. But it was not to the God-King’s way of thinking that a vast army should be dispatched so far at such expense without exploiting every possible avenue to profit.

  It was the beginning of Moses’ wisdom that he reflected upon his growing contempt for his own species instead of giving way to it. Yet the more he saw of them, the less able was he, in any way, to admire his own kind. Greedy, lustful, treacherous, boastful, ignorant and superstitious, they were animals without the simple and straightforward dignity of animals; they killed for the simple thrill of killing. Mercy was a word without meaning to them, and honour—it had come to a point where the very word macaat turned his stomach.

  They held a city whose young men had been massacred, and they turned it into a slave and a whore. They took children to bed with them, and they killed women as casually as men stepped on insects. Their talk was foul and unbridled, and if they had been wild men under the gods of Egypt, they were even less of mankind now that their gods were far away and powerless. They went out of their way to urinate and drop their faeces in the temple of the mother-goddess of Kush, for had they not dragged down her image and smashed it—just as they had overthrown all the other gods of Kush?

  Never before had Moses seen the gods so clearly as now. Far away they were, but their image was in these men and what they did; and alone, where he could not be heard, Moses defied the gods aloud, cursed them, and challenged them to do their worst with him. “Pay for the acts of your worshippers,” he would say to them. He became what the Egyptians and their neighbours called leshbed, which means an enemy of the gods, and thereby a madman. But Moses was hardly mad. And when he passed by the temple of Kush and saw the wanton wreckage and smelled the foul stink of human waste, he did not pity the gods of Kush, who, be felt, were no better or worse than the gods of Egypt, but instead told himself, “Wait, you gods of Egypt, until this is done to you.”

  He wrapped his princely aloofness around him like an invisible cloak, and he lived with his dream of Merit-Aton; but Sokar-Moses told him bluntly, as bluntly as he could, that they were a goodly distance from the Great House. “I suppose you want to go back,” he said.

  Moses shrugged. His own vision was of a white house on an escarpment overlooking the high reaches of the River Nile.

  “The God-King doesn’t want you back—for whatever reason he has. But I suppose you know that?”

  “I know it,” Moses nodded.

  Sokar-Moses went into details concerning the expedition and the God-King. Ramses was disappointed at the amount of loot that had been sent back to the Delta—just as the soldiers and captains were disappointed at their own share. It would be no victory triumph to return now, nor did Ramses desire the army back. The point was—here they were, and the God-King expected gold.

  “I don’t know what we can do about that,” Moses said, “We can’t make gold.”

  “But we can find it,” Sokar-Moses said, and then went on to specify his admiration for Moses as a man of military parts, a warrior and a killer. He reminded Moses that in the one glimpse he had had of him during the great battle where the manhood of Kush perished, he had seen a veritable god of hate and fury. “Seti-Keph knew his men,” he said. “How I wish he was here with me now!”

  It had to be said, and this man made his point directly and thoughtlessly; and it cut like a knife through the veneer of righteousness the young prince was building around himself. It would have taken a more sensitive man than Sokar-Moses to realize how complex and deeply confused Moses was; the commander could only grapple with simple virtues, simple defects, as he saw them, and he told Moses that he understood the other’s desire to return home. He could also smell the fear Ramses might well have of a son like this, a young man so tall and commanding in presence, terrible in battle, and seemingly lonely and given to brooding upon his own inner ambitions. A man who wore half of a name in defiant mystery.

  “You will go back in good time,” the Captain of Hosts assured him. “You have the God-King’s own sentence of exile for three years, and already half of the exile is over. And believe me, it weighs as heavily on us as on you, for your godly father is bitter enough about the small gifts we have sent him.”

  Moses no longer bothered to deny his parentage every time it was raised, and now he answered only that all the wealth in the world would still leave Ramses bitter and dissatisfied.

  “I pass no judgments on the gods,” Sokar-Moses said evenly. “The God-King, however, suggests that this City of Irgebayn is not the City of Kush at all—not the city of which our legends tell, where the walls are covered with gold and where there is a statue of the mother-goddess all of gold and silver and one hundred cubits high. And much more, as you know.”

  “These are stories for children,” Moses said. “How can you believe them?”

  “I am repeating your father’s words. He holds the city to be at the source of the Nile, where no man in our time has ever been—deep in those mountains to the south of us. But if we take the army there on a long chance of finding it, how will we protect our rear? And if we lose many men in the south, how do we know that we would ever fight our way back?”

  “In other words,” Moses smiled, “the Lord Ramses advises you to send me to the south to find a ci
ty that never existed, and if I don’t return, no one will weep?”

  Sokar-Moses was a direct man, and honest according to his lights. “More or less,” he agreed.

  [4]

  SO, IN TIME, Moses and Nun set out to find the legendary City of Kush. Lost cities and legendary cities, cities of beauty and peace and wealth beyond calculation, were an important part of men’s thoughts in those days. And Moses sensed that it had to be so. Whether it was Nun or Sokar-Moses or some Hittite mercenary, there was in every man a spark that pleaded for love, companionship, understanding; a spark that, no matter how overlaid it became with brutality and hostility, could not be snuffed out. So that when men looked upon their cities and saw the slums, the filth, the misery, the hunger, it was as if they looked upon what had happened to themselves. That they compared this reality with a dream that had no likelihood of fulfilment was something Moses had never before considered with any degree of thoughtfulness. Now he did, and almost to a point where he hoped he really would find a golden city to the south. For if honour, justice—the precious macaat of the Egyptians—had been proved completely hollow, he could console himself with the memory that macaat was a word he had never heard from the lips of Amon-Teph and Neph. Quite the contrary; they had accepted, as one accepts the day and night, the fact that the man of reason dwells in a world of unreason. But while so much of the fine edge of Moses’ youth had been hammered dull, his optimism and eagerness remained with him. Already he had known wholeness and infinite knowledge during his one night of love and enchantment with Merit-Aton; somewhere, he could believe, there was a promised land where reason blended with unreason—where men lived without murder, filth and deceit.

  So it could be said that when he left the city of the Kushites to journey south, he began a search and a wandering that was to be the expression of his life. Not that his life moved thereafter in any sort of direct line. He was still to taste the dregs and bottoms as well as the heights, and he was yet to know degradation and true nobility.

  Still, he was different, and no longer and never again the handsome, golden child of the Great House. He who had been the highest-born prince in all Egypt had to live with the fact that he was no prince at all but a Bedouin waif; and he whose life had been sheltered and guarded on every hand had lived for almost a year and a half now with an army of dark-minded and blood-stained men. He had killed without reason in all the blood-madness of killing; he had sacked a city; he had made pillage and ruin; and like another beast, he had shared the thoughts and company of men who were like beasts.

  Nevertheless, however he might scorn the Delta, it was his home and his memory; and to set his face away from it, perhaps forever so far as he knew, was no easy thing. He and Nun would go where no Egyptians had ever gone before, except those who were legends, and if he laughed at Nun’s fear of the edge of the earth—where the fires of Gehenna, black flames sixty times as hot as any earthly fire, burned and seized all who came near—he could find no comfort in his own belief that the earth was round. Terror of the unknown swallowed him as well as Nun.

  He had been like a child with Nun and now he became like a father to Nun. His own lonely terror was submerged in the responsibility of command—and as the terror dwindled, a sort of hard, cynical pride took its place.

  They set out by chariot, travelling south with the Nile. “How far will we go?” Nun asked, and Moses replied, “As our lord, Sokar-Moses, the Captain of Hosts, has instructed me, we will journey south for a hundred days, and then, if we find nothing, we will return.” “And if we find what we seek?” “Then we will also return and bring the Host to destroy what we have found.” His flat bitterness was not encouraging, and Nun asked no more. Moses took his black Kushite staff—the same staff with which he had fought Ramses-em-Seti, and named not because it was a weapon of Kush but for its colour—and cut a tiny notch into it. So was the first day marked, and each morning thereafter he notched it.

  * * *

  For a time, they found wheel-space for the chariot, and they travelled as best they could, following the course of the Blue Nile which veered eastward from south. Each night they made camp by the riverside, lighting a roaring blaze against the highland chill and roasting fresh meat when they were able to kill a bird or an antelope. Youth and the bondage of their loneliness brought them together, and in this time they became closer and they talked a good deal. It was during these evenings that Nun began, bit by bit and almost without conscious purpose, to make Moses familiar with the tongue spoken by the desert tribes and the herders of Canaan. The language of the Kushites had defied Moses completely, but between the Semite desert tongue and Egyptian, there was a haunting and elusive relationship—as if both languages had in the long-distant past a common ancestor. Also, it was similarly inflected—which made the verb forms easy to master. The part of the two young men that clung to boyhood took pleasure in another tongue in which to cry out or berate each other, and though no one else was near, it gave them a necessary added sense of intimacy. The estrangement that had sprung up between them after Hetep-Re’s murder could not persist. As the days passed, they began to smile, and then to laugh.

  It was also in this time that Moses made the discovery of Nun’s ancestry. It came out during one of Nun’s meandering discourses on gods and ancestors—for the deeper into the mountains they went, the more Nun feared the strange gods who dwelt on the peaks. He explained to Moses that every high place had its Baal—and he reacted in fear and anger at Moses’ smile of amusement. “You would do better to fear the gods,” he told Moses. In his own mind, he imagined the loss and despair he would feel should strange and vengeful gods strike down the Prince of Egypt. He could no longer bear the thought of being alone. “It is not that the Baalim are fierce,” he explained to Moses, trying to imitate his master’s method of logical presentation. “They are sly and tricky and they are afraid of Nehushtan—all of them, that is, except Yavah, who is a fierce and terrible Baal.” “And who is this Yavah?” Moses wanted to know—whereupon Nun explained that Yavah was the great Baal of Midian, a notation less than meaningful to Moses, who had never heard of either Yavah or Midian.

  It was plain that Nun feared Yavah, but even a fierce and terrible god was impotent in terms of the distance that separated them from the Baal’s place. Nun pricked off his ancestry. There was in the beginning Abraham, or as he said it, Av-Ram, a mighty desert chief who came into Canaan in the long, long ago; so long ago that perhaps even Egypt did not exist then.

  “Yet he had an Egyptian name,” Moses interrupted maliciously. “Av-Ram—could such a name be anything else but Egyptian?”

  Nun snapped back that all things good and admirable were taken by the Egyptians as their own; but his desire to expound his knowledge won out over his petulance. Like all Bedouins, he liked to talk of religious dogma and complexity, a part of which was genealogy, for as with all tribes, the most distant ancestor and the god himself were hardly separable. He was not certain whether Abraham had turned into the holy serpent Nehushtan, but in any case, the next great chief was Isaac or Yitz-Hak, and the son of Yitz-Hak, in his speech, was Ya-Kob, or Jacob, whose secret holy name was Israel, or as Nun sounded it, Yis-ra-el.

  As Nun talked on, the names fascinated Moses; and like the words of Nun’s own tongue, they seemed to flutter upon the edge of the Egyptian language. Then the image of the serpent caught him and excited his imagination. He plumbed his memory for what he sought, staring at the flames of the fire, overcome suddenly with nostalgia for the past and with desire for memories of the past to come alive again. So reminiscing, he once again heard AmonTeph tell the tale of the serpent in the box—the serpent was Nehushtan!

  Moses stared at Nun as if he had never seen him before. Nun spoke of the sons of Ya-Kob, Yo-Seph, as he said Joseph—and now Moses did not interrupt to remark that this too was an Egyptian name in its sound; in all truth, he did not hear the names at all, but asked Nun softly and desperately,

  “My friend and blood brother, of what
tribe are you?”

  The deep and pressing formality of address startled Nun, and suddenly he became conscious of the drawn face of Moses, the firelight gleaming on the high, bony ridges. “I am of the Tribe of Levi, who was a child of Israel,” he said.

  Moses nodded. The whole world embraced the two of them, crouched before their fire in the wilderness. “Are we truly brothers at that?” Moses wondered with awe.

  [5]

  THE THOUGHT CAME to Moses that they had been driven out of the world of man and mankind, for day followed day, and of man or his work or his habitation, they saw nothing. Not too long after they left the Land of Kush, they had been forced to abandon the chariot. The Nile had become a narrow, rushing mountain stream, pouring its white froth over rocks, churning through rapids, and leaping from ledge to ledge; and it was impossible any more to find wheel base for the broad axle of the chariot. They unharnessed the horses, loaded them with what supplies they could carry, and went on. After Moses had shown Nun the few simple tricks of maintaining his seat, the Levite rode well, and they made good time then on horseback. They had entered a region of grand, spectacular mountains, giants that rolled on endlessly to the south, and there they took their way, following the river through a series of deep and beautiful green valleys. It was the month after the end of the rainy season and the mountains were still green with such a richness of verdure as Moses and Nun had never seen before. The air was sharp and clean, the days pleasantly warm and the nights frequently so cold that they would build double fires and sleep close in the heat between the blazes.

  It was a country of many animals who had not learned to fear man. Bands of baboons barked at them from the hillsides and followed them curiously. Families of lions watched them without fear, and spotted leopards lay upon rocky crags in the warm sun and observed them go by. Monkeys charged at them through the rocks and brush, screaming noisily and foolishly, and their cry was taken up in the bizarre lament of hyenas. Birds of bright plumage flew across the valleys, and the hillsides swarmed with game, from the tiny antelope that appeared to soar through the air as they leaped down the slopes, to beasts as big as horses with straight horns four feet long. White goats perched on the crags, and often in the distance they saw what appeared to be cattle of a sort, a wild breed that was wary of them.